Accelerate your eCommerce ambitions with adeptCommerce Suite

SEO Egghead Consulting Group is a web development firm dedicated to creating custom, search-engine-optimized web site applications.

We specialize in eCommerce and content management web sites that not only render information beautifully to the human, but also satisfy the "third browser" - the search engine. To us, search engines are people too.

Archived; click post to view.Excerpt: WordPress is great. So are most other free and/or open-source applications. The only problem with these applications is that no matter how secure the other parts of your web site are, using such a popular application makes you an easy target for their widely circulated exploit scripts. There are lots of prying eyes on, say, WordPress. And exploiting popular open-source applications is interesting, because you get more bang for your buck. Upgrading helps, and of course we do it. But it still won't help for 0-day exploits, and it's not easy when you're managing…

Archived; click post to view.Excerpt: … or how to avoid needing this shirt.Your boss sucks, and so does this economy. I try to be a good boss, but realistically I probably suck too. Since I'm that guy … and I'm the guy who decides things, let me tell you 5 ways — at least in my mind — that will help you keep your job at a smaller IT firm. 0. Learn to be useful in another IT capacity If you stink at HTML, learn it better. Developers frequently won't know all of the pains of cutting HTML pixel-perfect or dealing with Photoshop; but…

Archived; click post to view.Excerpt: One of the things that irks me most about programmers getting involved with marketing is that most of them just don't know grammar. SEO Black Hat mentioned "Google are," I mentioned "then vs. than," and now I'll mention one more thing — "a vs. an." This one is a little different. Most people know this rule intuitively. But programmers frequently get lazy and do not look programmatically at the following word to decide which indefinite article to use. Being a programmer makes me slightly more forgiving, but this still looks bad. After I release this code, there are no more…

Archived; click post to view.Excerpt: This function, comprised of a simple regular expression, will remove most of the bloat from larger CSS files. Not that the effects are very substatial or groundbreaking, but it does save quite a few kilobytes to run things like this over your CSS and HTML. Using mod_gzip also has a favorable effect, but this cannot hurt either. If you find any real bugs, let me know; if it's something completely pathological and contrived, don't let me know. I have another filter for HTML; but I'll post it another day. Here it is: <? function trimCSS($str) {…

Archived; click post to view.Excerpt: Microsoft applications have this nasty habit of exchanging both your single and double quotes with "smarter" versions. They curve inwards and look really snazzy in Microsoft Word. When you cut and paste them, they're unencoded, as Windows assumes that everyone is using windows-1252 or something. Unfortunately, that's pretty annoying if you're not using a Windows character set. So you may want to alter them using the regular expressions that follow. ROTD stands for "regex of the day," in case you're wondering. And I was going for clarity here — not efficiency, so don't point out that this could be written…

Archived; click post to view.Excerpt: Someone commented on my last post that there is a way to achieve some of what I stated as a goal in the previous post without cloaking. He said:"Only create the session IDs in the URL when either one already exists, or when the user does something to prompt it (and make sure robots don't do this). For example, if you're making an ecommerce site, don't make the session for the shopping cart when the user enters the site; create it when they add their first item to their basket."I'll admit a partial defeat here. His suggestion does mostly work,…

Archived; click post to view.Excerpt: I wrote this script so that I can run it over arbitrary HTML. Basically, what it does is it adds rel="nofollow" to links that are not in an array of whitelisted domains. It sounds simple, but it gracefully handles many conditions that most people do not bother with. 1) As mentioned before, it has a whitelist. Obviously, you may want to whitelist your own site!2) It adds the parameter to a preeexisting rel attribute if applicable, i.e. rel="foo" becomes rel="foo,nofollow" 3) Works on unquoted parameters, i.e. rel=foo. So here it is:If you don't know why this is…

Archived; click post to view.Excerpt: I've always used '{' and '}' to access characters in a PHP string. I knew I could, but I never really used '[' and ']' to do the same, out of habit more than anything else. Apparently, not only is it allowed, but it's recommended by the PHP documentation here. "Characters within strings may be accessed and modified by specifying the zero-based offset of the desired character after the string using square array-brackets like $str[42] so think of a string as an array of characters. They may also be accessed using braces like $str{42} for the same purpose. However, using…